Sports Direct
Exhilarating performance
Categories
Web, Retail, Sports
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Sports Direct needed help adapting to an expanding brand portfolio, increased sales growth and demand. Faced with an ever-increasing list of brand acquisitions and over 80% online sales growth in 2011-12, supporting Sports Direct's website development was vital for their seasonal surge in demand.
THE CHALLENGE.
To better handle the volume of traffic and transactions, Sports Direct sought a scalable, available, and robust e-commerce platform, enabling content managers to easily maintain and update the site. The legacy system presented a number of concerns:
  • Non-scalable and expensive to maintain
  • Labour intensive: only technical staff could update and upload new content
  • New front-end web technologies not utilised
  • Deployment of new brand websites was too time-consuming

As new brand acquisitions increased, maintaining a legacy system with a challenging set-up became a struggle. Bringing newly acquired third-party websites into the existing e-commerce team before deployment was essential by unifying supplier extranets and integrating Sharepoint into the platform. This process delayed customers’ ability to purchase immediately, consequently Sports Direct required a Microsoft.NET Solution to de-couple their e-commerce offerings from the previous system to a more resilient online infrastructure to allow for a rapid return on investment.

DELIVERING E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY.
We collaborated on-site with Sports Directs’ own IT development team and DNN’s technical specialists to architect a solution tailored to Sportsdirect.com’s complex, technical and demanding business requirements.

Sports Direct’s minimum requirement was to replicate the functionality of their current website into a content management system that could be updated easily. Upon transferring existing code into DNN, the rapid development for a proof-of-concept website was created.

The DNN core team assisted in setting up the DNN development environment and provided best practices for skin and module development. After numerous cycles of development, refining code, and integrating DNN more effectively, extensions to the framework became a priority to provide feature-rich functionality. Working closely with the e-commerce team, we provided training to support existing developers and composed informative wikis to support contractors and other staff working on the project. Upon completion of the project, Cantarus returned to deploy a successful platform upgrade to DNN 7.
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Cantarus was considered for their Gold Partner status and dominance as the premier UK supplier of DNN to provide development, integration and training services for SportsDirect.com.
Jay Lyford, IT Manager
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